"iTunes doesn't give you your music back if you buy the songs and lose the original copy"
This is exactly why I won't participate. Just because a product is digital doesn't mean I'm willing to rent what I previously could own for less dough. mp3Tunes & eMusic are steps in the right direction, but both are still just a smidge short of my buy-in criteria.
I suppose iTunes is predominantly a Good Thing though. As was previously pointed out, it's managed to sever music distribution control from RIAA participating entities. That will prove to be a major factor in the RIAA's undoing. What's more, iTunes' success has proven that millions of people are willing to pay more than they did for physical CDs for the same amount of music, even in a DRM crippled version. It's also responsible for hoards of people getting accustomed to the digital media concept in the first place. When the medium matures enough for more users to have been burned by DRM, the demand for unencumbered media can only increase.
I feel morally obligated to keep as much cash as possible out of the RIAA & MPAA's hands. For now, the only way to meet that obligation any yet be legit with my digital media is to buy used CDs for any & all major label or major studio releases, and when possible, buy independent stuff direct from the artists. My fair use rights are preserved, and if enough people follow the practice, it provides a market benefit for artists who go independent. In the music market, I think more & more headline acts will eventually start considering independent distribution channels like mp3Tunes & eMusic labels as their existing contracts expire. These artists already have enough name recognition & following to ease their marketing requirements as compared to emerging artists, and that's one of the primary lures to signing on a major label to begin with.
I predict that music marketing will eventually become a service that acts pay for like any other service, rather than bait into extended crappy contracts like it so often is today.
I'm not sure how a similar transition could come about for movies though; the large amount of up-front financing they require makes studios a more integral part of the manufacturing and distribution chain. Indie films are less likely to be crap, but sadly, high-dollar major studio releases unfortunately still rake in significantly more dough.
I can only hope that his "Simplify!" mantra is borne of lessons learned from his Notes & Groove experience. If he's of a mind to bring the wisdom from which Notes was born into the Windows world, then, well... good news for Linux, I suppose.
I appreciate that take on the issue, but from a numbers perspective, I still think rulings like this - given a nontrivial increase in frequency - are more likely to have the opposite effect.
Even for a large corporation, it takes no small amount of labor to regularly whack a bevy of small interests over the head with various & sundry IP claims. The financial gain from doing so isn't immediately realized, and in a some percentage of cases, the corporation is investing in the protection of a low-value property item over the long haul. On the flip side, smaller interests have fewer resources to expend on legal strategy, and this dictates they be less prone to taking up claims without there being a good chance of a worthwhile payoff.
$65mm may be considered "chump change" in toto for a behemoth like Microsoft, but the number represents something larger in the context where they'd actually be considering it... as a line item in their ledger for the IP-assertion revenue stream. From their perspective, that loss offsets $65mm worth of gains from similar efforts. An accumulation of rulings like this doesn't have to make an entire corporation unprofitable to have an impact on their legal tactics in the IP arena. It just needs to make the tactics themselves less attractive from a numbers standpoint. I think the bar is lower here than is commonly perceived.
All that said though, even if my optimism is spot on (which it may well not be on several counts), the scenario resembles "reparations" more than real reform, so I agree that it doesn't present an ideal correction to a broken system.
Well said, but being that we're stranded in a suboptimal reality, the in-force patent system has goals that are anything but promoting innovation. Turning the tables on behemoth portfolio holders by itself doesn't constitute reform, but so long as existing precedents are firm & new ones aren't set by the ruling, then this is more likely to move things *towards* reform than away from it.
Legislators will reliably favor well-to-do interests who can afford their ear. The courts aren't so predictable. If their decisions result in the patent game carrying a higher risk for large companies, then you can be sure the lobby for patent reform will no longer require grass-roots funding.
If your router interface supports it, clone the MAC addy of the Winders machine you connected with, or take note of it & enter it manually. Keep it handy in case your router ever goes tits up & the MS PC isn't handy anymore. It also seems that the lifetime of the semi-static IP address that Comcast assignes is bound to that MAC addy, so there's some value to keeping it constant.
As far as DNS, I've been able to add `em manually so far - both at the router stage & as a forwarder for my internal DNS server. If crap like this continues though, I expect privacy & stability-enhancing VPN services to become more commonplace; at least I'm getting increasingly willing to pay for a secure connection that trashes all my IP logs & at least minimally obfuscates the packets, regardless the proto.
Yeah, the metasites & link farms are sure gaining in annoyance factor - in direct proportion to their page rank. Which reminds me... has the "remove this result" feature disappeared for any other users of Google Personalized?
Any hypothetical Google Killer would be well served by implementing a union of the features of the above utils. Sync my bookmarks (the ones in my menu bar, not just on a page you own), archive the pages for me, make keywords out of the bookmarks' directory structure, make keyword:domain associations out of those relationships in my bookmarks, and let me search only the relevant domains by using a simple "#_categoryname_#:" operator in the search. Then show me domains with rising representation in peoples' bookmarks and which have strong associations with my category of interest. How hard is that? Nobody's rolled it all together in a do-it-all-for-ya fashion, but the features are all out there piecemeal.
And "trusted." How long before epoxy-embedded DRM hardware is a requirement?
Given the overhead involved in HDCP certification, requiring that will probably do one of three things: it will essentially eliminate PC building from the purview of Mom & Pop Shops and DIYers, or it will downgrade Windows as an OS choice for these folks, or it will downgrade the meaningfulness of certification. Sadly, it's probably going to take a release or two before the masses finally realize that in system terms, "trusted" means "digitial chaperone" and "mafiaa system backdoor"[1] more than it means "enhanced security."
I agree about stupidity still being necessary; the headline made it sound like PayPal itself had been hacked & compromised without user interaction. This belongs in the Phish bucket.
Sure, a site can adopt practics to make itself more resistant to cross site scripting, frame injection, etc., but this isn't anything new, and for the forseeable future, there will continue to be browser flaws that the targeted site can do nothing about.
A preponderance of users will always be stupid. I don't see this kind of thing going away unless someone develops an ultra-hardened alternative browser, and it then became ubiquitous, i.e. a large majority of people never access sites with high-value PII any other way.
At a minimum, a browser for this purpose would have to be single instance, no tabs, no background windows, non-invokable from externally clicked hyperlinks, and resistant to programmatic instantiation. It would have to encrypt all cached data, and only submit requests to domains that were explicitly pre-authorized by the user -- with an IP check on the associated netblock & whois info at the time of the request.
For obvious reasons, this couldn't be a general-purpose browser. But financial services providers might stand to gain from a collaborative effort to commission such a browser & then *strongly* encourage (read: coerce) users into adopting it for sites with high-value private information.
Even though Weird Al is a favorite of mine, my beef isn't so much with him getting less dough. It's more about the label getting more -- or any, for that matter. Come on, this is a time when market shifts should be putting more distribution control into the artists' hands, not less. Decimate the record *label* industry, and the market will find a reasonable level of wealth for successful artists.
Weird Al is one of maybe 10 artists who I would still buy a retail CD of. Since I don't buy from download stores, I guess I don't figure much in the numbers above. Why contribute to the financial viability of proprietary & DRM encumbered formats? They're not going to die quickly if we keep feeding them.
For reasons like the aforementioned, I try not to fund major labels, and pick my retail music purchases like picking charitable organizations for donations. Other than a handful whose sales figures I specifically want to support, I only purchase new CDs direct from indie acts. If stuff I want is on an RIAA-associated label, I either find it used or I don't buy it at all.
"Progress," implicitly defined as "advancing the prevailing view." Prestige and capital gravitate towards those who do so in high profile ways. Dissenting views, having less standing in the academic community they pertain to, will usually need to meet a higher standard to be considered journal worthy.
Besides, the climate issue is "important." It's one thing to swim upstream on some esoteric bit of acedemic minutae; it's a different matter to commit blasphemy against social consciousness itself. Well intentioned but mistaken people can do the former. Only the willfully malevolent can do the latter.
For most general purpose programming, sure interpretive languages will get better. The CLR's role will need to expand to encompass that of a compiler and an installer. IL's need to be capable of resource awareness, in addition to maintaining platform independence. Development environments would still build IL assemblies, but the first task of the average runtime library would be to polish up the IL in the native context of the target system (OS, processor, bus, etc.), then persist that output.
Parallelism might take some heavy retraining for those not used to it, but even this can be eased along by constructs like method attributes and compiler hints.
Except in extreme instances, the really hard work of multi-core enabling executable code will be put in by the IL, compiler and CLR designers, not by the average keyboard jockey. I'd also imagine that as these things continue to evolve, the problem of managing an expanding array of entry points into hardware resources will be handled by some of those additional hardware resources themselves.
Like rootkits. The issues keeping *me* away from Sony products are over things like their maliciousness with DRM. I guess I've stopped considering the consumer value proposition of the products themselves.
I don't know how prevalent this is in Europe or elsewhere, but too many US startups & dynamic independent companies operate with IPO or acquisition as their prime goal. Public companies suffer from an atrophied collective conscience.
I'd love to see a new kind of corporate charter or certification come about - one that put restrictions on the acquirability of the corporate entity, and enforced an internal succession planning ethic. It'd be awfully hard to engineer, but it'd weigh pretty heavily in my investment decisions if it existed.
Example: In the Chicago area, we have a 20+ year old gem of a radio station known as WXRT; they run the most interesting and innovative musical programming I've heard anywhere, and have some of the longest tenured and most community-rooted on-air personalities to boot. They regularly discover & introduce acts far in advance of those acts becoming popular, and they religiously keep over-saturated tunes off their playlist. I first heard many acts & tracks on XRT, including Sinead O'Connor, John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams, Chris Isaak, the Black Crowes, Liz Phair, most worthwhile U2 tracks, They Might Be Giants, INXS (early), Radiohead, DMB (before anyone else was playing them here), and on and on. By the time some of these acts became ubiquitous pop sensations, XRT had moved on to fresher ground.
Anyway, not long ago, XRT was aquired by one of the Big Megalomated Media companies, but *somehow*, they've managed to keep most of what makes them the one-of-a-kind station they are - so far. From a profit standpoint, the Megalo-execs have to be planning XRT's transformation into McDonald's Radio #26803. I fear this might be in process in a deliberately slow manner, since lately they're airing little bit by little bit more of the same mundane crap that other stations play, which used to be minimal to unheard of.
Now, how could one engineer a charter with teeth that would preserve an entitity like this without dooming it financially? In my example, XRT was dynamic, independent, and had a passion for both music and Chicago. They excelled at what they did, and still do so far. Is there a legal wrapper that could codify those qualities (or the attributes that made them possible) and permanently commit a company to them?
For quite a few applications, that's enough to deep six SMS4 right there.
Presuming an area full of sniffers, is there much doubt as to the safer choice between published asymmetric and unpublished symmetric?
It's nice that people worry so much about them getting into a snit & walking out of a meeting. I mean, it's not like anyone could just go ahead & make decisions without their input, could they?
Along with all the (mostly justified) bytes emitted over privacy concerns, I'd love to see more counter-suggestions.
I get my share of laughs from the DHS's & NSA's seeming ineptness at implementing effective counter-terrorist tactics. But lately, I'm increasingly interested in what folks think the US *ought* to do in terms of discovering terrorist networks and disrupting any plans they might have.
In terms of government usage of data, don't most precedents regarding protecting Americans' privacy place the remedy at the prosecution stage - via denying admissibility - rather than at the evidence gathering stage? I expect anything I put on a social networking site would meet the "in plain sight" criteria, and would thus be admissible in any criminal prosecution.
Can we even differentiate the handling of domestic criminals versus that of enemy combatants, and if so, at what stage of the enforcement effort (data gathering, trial)? For example, what about mass-gathered NSA telephone data usage, in domestic criminal prosecutions versus in civil cases? Does allowing a gov't agency more leeway against terrorists set a course towards the same tactics eventually being permissible against all of us?
I guess my query boils down to finding tactics that meet two criteria: (a) That US citizens' rights are preserved now & in the future, and (b), that the tactic is ultimately effective. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd have a pretty high regard for any original ideas that meet both of these.
Very well said. That belongs in a dramatic chain email. (Just give Snopes some advance warning.)
Sample message:
Subj: "Congress allows Hollywood to remotely lock your TV!" ... or, "Congress allows Hollywood remotely erase your CDs, DVDs, and computer files." ... or, "Did you know it's *Illegal* to remove MPAA's remote control software from PCs or A/V electronics?" and follow up... with... "It's illegal even to hypothetically discuss how!" ----- Body: [...] ----- Sig: Please tell your legislators what you think of this! People need to know this is happening, so forward this to everyone you know! Tell them to boycott the RIAA's and MPAA's CDs, DVDs, and movies. Don't buy Windows Vista. Make sure your computers are capable & powerful *now*; soon you won't be able to legally buy them without these threats built into the hardware. For TVs and home theater electronics, it's already too late. If it says "HDCP compliant" or "Trusted Hardware," don't buy it - someone else can control it against your wishes, and if they so choose, even prevent it from working with other devices you purchased. Find a geek friend that's trustworthy and ask them about free, open-source software that protects your privacy and your right to be in control of the devices and products you own."
Sadly, getting our concerns taken seriously has little to do with getting them addressed. The causes that consistently achieve their objectives are usually the ones with the most efficient FUD distribution networks. FUD travels faster through hysteria and drama than through an atmosphere of rationality. Think DHMO.
Distasteful as it is, by and large, the dealmaking class only hears "buzz" in terms of amplitude. The merits are irrelevant unless they somehow translate into either votes or dollars.
EFF leans toward this approach with headlines like "Entertainment companies want to control your computer" on their The Battle for Your Digital Media Devices page. These organizations are rightly not crafting these things for/. types; someone has to get aunt Sally's & cousin Topher's attention and get them asking what's going on. Lather & repeat until there's a ubiquitous murmer of discontent, ill-informed as it may be. A well-informed mob is smaller and more polite, so it's really hard to justify that extra overhead when you need to accomplish something *now*.
"Is there any physical limitation that would prevent you from wielding a pitchfork?" "Nope." "Got torch?" "Yep." "Lighter?" "Check." "Great! welcome to our cause! Right this way..."
Yikes! gotta run... there's a "CBS Investigates" on & I just overheard something about Lenovo computers being used to infect us all with the bird flu. Next thing you know, my brand of 2½-lb genetically engineered portabello mushrooms will turn out to increase my risk of age spots or something...
What's more, even after the insane patent was granted, this still should have had a stake put in it seven years ago. If an infringing system can be made non-infringing simply by adding superfluous complexity to the infringing apparatus, then the patent (whether Amazon's or some predecessor's) is devoid of any recognizable intellectual property:
"In 1999, Amazon obtained an injunction that forced rival bookseller barnesandnoble.com to go to two clicks"
So there you have it. Unless the USPTO vacates this patent, according to the logic in the injunction Amazon obtained, we'd have to let Barnes & Noble register ownership of "two click ordering" if they so desired. Then online bookstores & other retailers could logically follow suit, until Newegg was 84th in line & I had to write client-side auto-follow scripts to speed through the checkout process.
I have a virtual donut for anyone with a screenshot of what when Barnes & Noble's second click looked like when they first implemented it to comply with the injunction. I'd have done something like "Your order is almost complete. Please click here for no reason whatsoever except that a pissy competitor of ours fought in court to create this hassle for you. (More info)"
"[...] several other online businesses claimed [the patent] was overly broad and that the technology wasn't very original."
Well duh. For all the ink that's been spilt on this issue, I'm amazed that all it took was a dude from New Zealand willing to throw a few grand at the problem to get it reviewed. Krikey!
"Amazon.com remains confident in the validity of its 1-Click patent, which enables customers to shop conveniently without having to enter their shipping and billing information each time they purchase."
Uhhh... wait a minute. Was Amazon saying they own the idea of not having to re-enter one's shipping & billing information with each purchase? Really?
I'm more cynical on that. If this idea ever got critical mass & got sponsored *, you'd start seeing massive PSAs and a sudden saturation of anti-reform talking points in the media.
The "doesn't take a dime from plaintiffs" fact would be lost in the FUD. Everyone would have a vague sense of how a few bad, mean, greedy people were trying to "create roadblocks," "slash the quality of legal representation" and generally "make it harder" for them should they ever need to join forces with other victims of big, reckless theiving corporate interests & take legal action.
I'd be happy if I were proven wrong here, of course.
But maybe we'll be able to customize the notification emoticon when we get sick of the "horrified Clippy" default.
Seriously though, I have to break from the consensus here; I think this can only be a good thing in the long run. At its least significant, this'll be just another Revolutionary Idea in Microsoft's ash heap(TM). At its best though, it will succeed & popularize the notion of a consolidated "process intent inference" platform. I don't think that would be a bad thing to have popularized, especially when FOSS picks up the gauntlet with a focus on distributed knowlege gathering with transparency as an organizing principle.
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"iTunes doesn't give you your music back if you buy the songs and lose the original copy"
This is exactly why I won't participate. Just because a product is digital doesn't mean I'm willing to rent what I previously could own for less dough. mp3Tunes & eMusic are steps in the right direction, but both are still just a smidge short of my buy-in criteria.
I suppose iTunes is predominantly a Good Thing though. As was previously pointed out, it's managed to sever music distribution control from RIAA participating entities. That will prove to be a major factor in the RIAA's undoing. What's more, iTunes' success has proven that millions of people are willing to pay more than they did for physical CDs for the same amount of music, even in a DRM crippled version. It's also responsible for hoards of people getting accustomed to the digital media concept in the first place. When the medium matures enough for more users to have been burned by DRM, the demand for unencumbered media can only increase.
I feel morally obligated to keep as much cash as possible out of the RIAA & MPAA's hands. For now, the only way to meet that obligation any yet be legit with my digital media is to buy used CDs for any & all major label or major studio releases, and when possible, buy independent stuff direct from the artists. My fair use rights are preserved, and if enough people follow the practice, it provides a market benefit for artists who go independent. In the music market, I think more & more headline acts will eventually start considering independent distribution channels like mp3Tunes & eMusic labels as their existing contracts expire. These artists already have enough name recognition & following to ease their marketing requirements as compared to emerging artists, and that's one of the primary lures to signing on a major label to begin with.
I predict that music marketing will eventually become a service that acts pay for like any other service, rather than bait into extended crappy contracts like it so often is today.
I'm not sure how a similar transition could come about for movies though; the large amount of up-front financing they require makes studios a more integral part of the manufacturing and distribution chain. Indie films are less likely to be crap, but sadly, high-dollar major studio releases unfortunately still rake in significantly more dough.
^^^ What he said. ^^^
I can only hope that his "Simplify!" mantra is borne of lessons learned from his Notes & Groove experience. If he's of a mind to bring the wisdom from which Notes was born into the Windows world, then, well... good news for Linux, I suppose.
I appreciate that take on the issue, but from a numbers perspective, I still think rulings like this - given a nontrivial increase in frequency - are more likely to have the opposite effect.
Even for a large corporation, it takes no small amount of labor to regularly whack a bevy of small interests over the head with various & sundry IP claims. The financial gain from doing so isn't immediately realized, and in a some percentage of cases, the corporation is investing in the protection of a low-value property item over the long haul. On the flip side, smaller interests have fewer resources to expend on legal strategy, and this dictates they be less prone to taking up claims without there being a good chance of a worthwhile payoff.
$65mm may be considered "chump change" in toto for a behemoth like Microsoft, but the number represents something larger in the context where they'd actually be considering it... as a line item in their ledger for the IP-assertion revenue stream. From their perspective, that loss offsets $65mm worth of gains from similar efforts. An accumulation of rulings like this doesn't have to make an entire corporation unprofitable to have an impact on their legal tactics in the IP arena. It just needs to make the tactics themselves less attractive from a numbers standpoint. I think the bar is lower here than is commonly perceived.
All that said though, even if my optimism is spot on (which it may well not be on several counts), the scenario resembles "reparations" more than real reform, so I agree that it doesn't present an ideal correction to a broken system.
Well said, but being that we're stranded in a suboptimal reality, the in-force patent system has goals that are anything but promoting innovation. Turning the tables on behemoth portfolio holders by itself doesn't constitute reform, but so long as existing precedents are firm & new ones aren't set by the ruling, then this is more likely to move things *towards* reform than away from it.
Legislators will reliably favor well-to-do interests who can afford their ear. The courts aren't so predictable. If their decisions result in the patent game carrying a higher risk for large companies, then you can be sure the lobby for patent reform will no longer require grass-roots funding.
If your router interface supports it, clone the MAC addy of the Winders machine you connected with, or take note of it & enter it manually. Keep it handy in case your router ever goes tits up & the MS PC isn't handy anymore. It also seems that the lifetime of the semi-static IP address that Comcast assignes is bound to that MAC addy, so there's some value to keeping it constant.
As far as DNS, I've been able to add `em manually so far - both at the router stage & as a forwarder for my internal DNS server. If crap like this continues though, I expect privacy & stability-enhancing VPN services to become more commonplace; at least I'm getting increasingly willing to pay for a secure connection that trashes all my IP logs & at least minimally obfuscates the packets, regardless the proto.
Yeah, the metasites & link farms are sure gaining in annoyance factor - in direct proportion to their page rank. Which reminds me... has the "remove this result" feature disappeared for any other users of Google Personalized?
Anyway... Rollyo + Furl + Foxmarks = Crazy Delicious.
Any hypothetical Google Killer would be well served by implementing a union of the features of the above utils. Sync my bookmarks (the ones in my menu bar, not just on a page you own), archive the pages for me, make keywords out of the bookmarks' directory structure, make keyword:domain associations out of those relationships in my bookmarks, and let me search only the relevant domains by using a simple "#_categoryname_#:" operator in the search. Then show me domains with rising representation in peoples' bookmarks and which have strong associations with my category of interest. How hard is that? Nobody's rolled it all together in a do-it-all-for-ya fashion, but the features are all out there piecemeal.
And "trusted." How long before epoxy-embedded DRM hardware is a requirement?
Given the overhead involved in HDCP certification, requiring that will probably do one of three things: it will essentially eliminate PC building from the purview of Mom & Pop Shops and DIYers, or it will downgrade Windows as an OS choice for these folks, or it will downgrade the meaningfulness of certification. Sadly, it's probably going to take a release or two before the masses finally realize that in system terms, "trusted" means "digitial chaperone" and "mafiaa system backdoor"[1] more than it means "enhanced security."
---
[1]http://mafiaa.org/
I agree about stupidity still being necessary; the headline made it sound like PayPal itself had been hacked & compromised without user interaction. This belongs in the Phish bucket.
Sure, a site can adopt practics to make itself more resistant to cross site scripting, frame injection, etc., but this isn't anything new, and for the forseeable future, there will continue to be browser flaws that the targeted site can do nothing about.
A preponderance of users will always be stupid. I don't see this kind of thing going away unless someone develops an ultra-hardened alternative browser, and it then became ubiquitous, i.e. a large majority of people never access sites with high-value PII any other way.
At a minimum, a browser for this purpose would have to be single instance, no tabs, no background windows, non-invokable from externally clicked hyperlinks, and resistant to programmatic instantiation. It would have to encrypt all cached data, and only submit requests to domains that were explicitly pre-authorized by the user -- with an IP check on the associated netblock & whois info at the time of the request.
For obvious reasons, this couldn't be a general-purpose browser. But financial services providers might stand to gain from a collaborative effort to commission such a browser & then *strongly* encourage (read: coerce) users into adopting it for sites with high-value private information.
Not to mention the question of why the US government should act as stop-loss agents for a private industry?
Even though Weird Al is a favorite of mine, my beef isn't so much with him getting less dough. It's more about the label getting more -- or any, for that matter. Come on, this is a time when market shifts should be putting more distribution control into the artists' hands, not less. Decimate the record *label* industry, and the market will find a reasonable level of wealth for successful artists.
Weird Al is one of maybe 10 artists who I would still buy a retail CD of. Since I don't buy from download stores, I guess I don't figure much in the numbers above. Why contribute to the financial viability of proprietary & DRM encumbered formats? They're not going to die quickly if we keep feeding them.
For reasons like the aforementioned, I try not to fund major labels, and pick my retail music purchases like picking charitable organizations for donations. Other than a handful whose sales figures I specifically want to support, I only purchase new CDs direct from indie acts. If stuff I want is on an RIAA-associated label, I either find it used or I don't buy it at all.
"Progress," implicitly defined as "advancing the prevailing view." Prestige and capital gravitate towards those who do so in high profile ways. Dissenting views, having less standing in the academic community they pertain to, will usually need to meet a higher standard to be considered journal worthy.
Besides, the climate issue is "important." It's one thing to swim upstream on some esoteric bit of acedemic minutae; it's a different matter to commit blasphemy against social consciousness itself. Well intentioned but mistaken people can do the former. Only the willfully malevolent can do the latter.
Well if they're right, coffee & Bailey's ought to be a break even as far as the ol' liver is concerned.
Now I just wonder if 12 cups a day is enough to offset the single-malt habit... if so, I'm a hell of a lot healthier than I thought.
For most general purpose programming, sure interpretive languages will get better. The CLR's role will need to expand to encompass that of a compiler and an installer. IL's need to be capable of resource awareness, in addition to maintaining platform independence. Development environments would still build IL assemblies, but the first task of the average runtime library would be to polish up the IL in the native context of the target system (OS, processor, bus, etc.), then persist that output.
Parallelism might take some heavy retraining for those not used to it, but even this can be eased along by constructs like method attributes and compiler hints.
Except in extreme instances, the really hard work of multi-core enabling executable code will be put in by the IL, compiler and CLR designers, not by the average keyboard jockey. I'd also imagine that as these things continue to evolve, the problem of managing an expanding array of entry points into hardware resources will be handled by some of those additional hardware resources themselves.
I'm going to have to wait even longer not to buy a Blu Ray unit?
Crap. I was really anxious to opt out of provider-updateable DRM ("Self-Protecting Digital Content") sooner rather than later.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=884
Like rootkits. The issues keeping *me* away from Sony products are over things like their maliciousness with DRM. I guess I've stopped considering the consumer value proposition of the products themselves.
I don't know how prevalent this is in Europe or elsewhere, but too many US startups & dynamic independent companies operate with IPO or acquisition as their prime goal. Public companies suffer from an atrophied collective conscience.
I'd love to see a new kind of corporate charter or certification come about - one that put restrictions on the acquirability of the corporate entity, and enforced an internal succession planning ethic. It'd be awfully hard to engineer, but it'd weigh pretty heavily in my investment decisions if it existed.
Example: In the Chicago area, we have a 20+ year old gem of a radio station known as WXRT; they run the most interesting and innovative musical programming I've heard anywhere, and have some of the longest tenured and most community-rooted on-air personalities to boot. They regularly discover & introduce acts far in advance of those acts becoming popular, and they religiously keep over-saturated tunes off their playlist. I first heard many acts & tracks on XRT, including Sinead O'Connor, John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams, Chris Isaak, the Black Crowes, Liz Phair, most worthwhile U2 tracks, They Might Be Giants, INXS (early), Radiohead, DMB (before anyone else was playing them here), and on and on. By the time some of these acts became ubiquitous pop sensations, XRT had moved on to fresher ground.
Anyway, not long ago, XRT was aquired by one of the Big Megalomated Media companies, but *somehow*, they've managed to keep most of what makes them the one-of-a-kind station they are - so far. From a profit standpoint, the Megalo-execs have to be planning XRT's transformation into McDonald's Radio #26803. I fear this might be in process in a deliberately slow manner, since lately they're airing little bit by little bit more of the same mundane crap that other stations play, which used to be minimal to unheard of.
Now, how could one engineer a charter with teeth that would preserve an entitity like this without dooming it financially? In my example, XRT was dynamic, independent, and had a passion for both music and Chicago. They excelled at what they did, and still do so far. Is there a legal wrapper that could codify those qualities (or the attributes that made them possible) and permanently commit a company to them?
...and, uh, symmetric?
For quite a few applications, that's enough to deep six SMS4 right there.
Presuming an area full of sniffers, is there much doubt as to the safer choice between published asymmetric and unpublished symmetric?
It's nice that people worry so much about them getting into a snit & walking out of a meeting. I mean, it's not like anyone could just go ahead & make decisions without their input, could they?
Oh, the ordinary Roomba poses you no harm, I assure you.
The one that has Hitler's brain in it is another matter, however.
Along with all the (mostly justified) bytes emitted over privacy concerns, I'd love to see more counter-suggestions.
I get my share of laughs from the DHS's & NSA's seeming ineptness at implementing effective counter-terrorist tactics. But lately, I'm increasingly interested in what folks think the US *ought* to do in terms of discovering terrorist networks and disrupting any plans they might have.
In terms of government usage of data, don't most precedents regarding protecting Americans' privacy place the remedy at the prosecution stage - via denying admissibility - rather than at the evidence gathering stage? I expect anything I put on a social networking site would meet the "in plain sight" criteria, and would thus be admissible in any criminal prosecution.
Can we even differentiate the handling of domestic criminals versus that of enemy combatants, and if so, at what stage of the enforcement effort (data gathering, trial)? For example, what about mass-gathered NSA telephone data usage, in domestic criminal prosecutions versus in civil cases? Does allowing a gov't agency more leeway against terrorists set a course towards the same tactics eventually being permissible against all of us?
I guess my query boils down to finding tactics that meet two criteria: (a) That US citizens' rights are preserved now & in the future, and (b), that the tactic is ultimately effective. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd have a pretty high regard for any original ideas that meet both of these.
Sample message:
Status: True(ish)! ;-)
Distasteful as it is, by and large, the dealmaking class only hears "buzz" in terms of amplitude. The merits are irrelevant unless they somehow translate into either votes or dollars.
EFF leans toward this approach with headlines like "Entertainment companies want to control your computer" on their The Battle for Your Digital Media Devices page. These organizations are rightly not crafting these things for /. types; someone has to get aunt Sally's & cousin Topher's attention and get them asking what's going on. Lather & repeat until there's a ubiquitous murmer of discontent, ill-informed as it may be. A well-informed mob is smaller and more polite, so it's really hard to justify that extra overhead when you need to accomplish something *now*.
"Is there any physical limitation that would prevent you from wielding a pitchfork?" "Nope." "Got torch?" "Yep." "Lighter?" "Check." "Great! welcome to our cause! Right this way..."
Yikes! gotta run... there's a "CBS Investigates" on & I just overheard something about Lenovo computers being used to infect us all with the bird flu. Next thing you know, my brand of 2½-lb genetically engineered portabello mushrooms will turn out to increase my risk of age spots or something...
Seems to be gaining momentum on the "vigilant review" front - two re-exams granted just recently:
8 2a rchannel
Test.com: http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_05.php#0046
Clear Channel: http://www.eff.org/patent/wanted/patent.php?p=cle
God, I'm glad these guys do what they do.
http://www.eff.org/patent/
So there you have it. Unless the USPTO vacates this patent, according to the logic in the injunction Amazon obtained, we'd have to let Barnes & Noble register ownership of "two click ordering" if they so desired. Then online bookstores & other retailers could logically follow suit, until Newegg was 84th in line & I had to write client-side auto-follow scripts to speed through the checkout process.
I have a virtual donut for anyone with a screenshot of what when Barnes & Noble's second click looked like when they first implemented it to comply with the injunction. I'd have done something like "Your order is almost complete. Please click here for no reason whatsoever except that a pissy competitor of ours fought in court to create this hassle for you. (More info)"
Well duh. For all the ink that's been spilt on this issue, I'm amazed that all it took was a dude from New Zealand willing to throw a few grand at the problem to get it reviewed. Krikey!
Uhhh... wait a minute. Was Amazon saying they own the idea of not having to re-enter one's shipping & billing information with each purchase? Really?
I'm more cynical on that. If this idea ever got critical mass & got sponsored *, you'd start seeing massive PSAs and a sudden saturation of anti-reform talking points in the media.
The "doesn't take a dime from plaintiffs" fact would be lost in the FUD. Everyone would have a vague sense of how a few bad, mean, greedy people were trying to "create roadblocks," "slash the quality of legal representation" and generally "make it harder" for them should they ever need to join forces with other victims of big, reckless theiving corporate interests & take legal action.
I'd be happy if I were proven wrong here, of course.
Seriously though, I have to break from the consensus here; I think this can only be a good thing in the long run. At its least significant, this'll be just another Revolutionary Idea in Microsoft's ash heap(TM). At its best though, it will succeed & popularize the notion of a consolidated "process intent inference" platform. I don't think that would be a bad thing to have popularized, especially when FOSS picks up the gauntlet with a focus on distributed knowlege gathering with transparency as an organizing principle.